TAMED BEASTS

A series of paintings by Danijel Srdarev

Danijel Srdarev’s playful vision and relaxed drawings are expressed in
numerous media, in different modifications, in a multitude of emanations. We
were first acquainted with his work in images for books and magazines, in
illustrations and publications aimed at children, or pedagogical-didactic
activity. Within all these applied and contextual tasks he managed to maintain
his own individual note, and impose his own print of a specific creative investment.
We noticed that a major attribute of his work is a need to surpass the
limitations of the composition, an almost instinctive challenge of relativizing
the given frame, a necessity to place the line and the stain over the edges of
the paper of cardboard. The volume and the “fizzing” of the manuscript seems to
provoke the overreaction, going around the format, pouring or overflow of
collected energy from layer to layer, from one surface to another.

The young artist, sensitive to the material and resources used,
varies between techniques and bases, and he readily uses rough and transparent
surfaces to, through connecting them, create a duality of effect, noting the
bottom contours and linear ball through the transparent light membrane of the
top layer. Besides that, he often successfully mixes the ingredients of
painting, drawing and graphics; uses a same part to apply his own hand and
parts of printed sheets. Sometimes he completes the metric diversity with
“kinetic” combinations, polyptych ensembles meant for the viewers to ludically
vary the offered elements, to recompose them aleatorically and to use them to
build new and different structures of the gathered particles. So far his
exhibits have shown great freedom and ingenuity of work programs and final solutions,
but he has in no way sacrificed the primal properties of inborn drawing and
graphic sensibilities.

The painting series called “Bestiarium” is a remarkable
confirmation of his imaginational and finalization uniqueness. The motives are
at first sight close to an infantile fantasy, but they give the opportunity for
real drawing and material-technical effects; for a successful combination of
closeness and skill, easiness and experience. The selection of the topic has to
have a scholarly, trans-historical, an almost quotable base, all the more
because the selected animalism is situated in the historically saturated
Venetian context. We shouldn’t forget that Venice is the town of St. Mark, who
is symbolized by a lion; that Pietro Longhi back in the XVIII century set up
exotic prey – an inert body of a captured rhino; and we can and may imagine all
sorts of monsters.

Danijel Srdarev, of course, cannot resist attacking the very
images of such monstrous creatures, so he evokes “The Dragon from Canal Grande”,
an elongated tailed creature which floats amongst the poles for tying up
gondolas. The artist cannot evade or attack the following of Longhi’s
precedent, thus the painting “ARRRR” represents his version of the rhino, with
its mouth open in a roar. Of course, the lion couldn’t have been left out, and
it’s represented in the piece “AUVAAARRR (In Venetian Garden)”. In this
selected company is also “The crocodile at Peggy Guggenheim’s”, and it’s
followed by creatures like narwhals or a hippo in “Common Ground”, and a
character which combines the properties of a reptile and mammal, named “UF”.
These larger paintings are joined by other works on paper, also marked by signs
of Venetian provenance (“Dorsoduro”), but also characteristic rhythms of
alternating between stains and letters, linear nettings and decorative streams,
and all with a special sensitivity for background, base, brownish rough base
which necessarily breaks out from behind and under every presented form.

Danijel Srdarev’s Animalia mostly treats the cruel, hungry,
frightening, mighty and threatening representatives of the fauna. It is not an
accident that several of the titles are onomatopoeic, which suggests the sound
which should freeze one in place. The main features of the creatures are jaws
and mouths, pointy horns and sharp teeth, sharp claws and spiky scales,
bristled mane and dangerously pointing tails. But it is all flavoured with
irony and tamed with almost gentle shaping. The author’s ductus is apparent in
the aesthetic staccato, in the
measured lines of triangles and rhombuses, in the organic lines of commas and
hyphens, in a systematic exchange of dark and light zones, in a skillful
interpolation of mechanically printed parts. In a word, in the ability to
ludically assimilate the fantastic imagery and the strength of transforming the
unusual to close – this is the opposite of conventional expectations.